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Act-On Software CEO Raghu Raghavan came to Oregon to work for Mentor Graphics Corp. and was later co-founder and chief technology officer of online marketing company Responsys.
(Randy L. Rasmussen/The Oregonian)

The Silicon Valley venture firm Technology Crossover Ventures led Tuesday’s round, joined by several prior Act-On investors. The money reflects a big bet by Act-On and its backers that a leap in 2013 revenue can be replicated by expanding the company’s own marketing efforts, opening offices across the U.S and overseas.

“You can’t just add one or two people,” said Raghu Raghavan, Act-On’s founder and chief executive. “If you’re going to do this right, then you need to be a certain scale of operation.”

So Act-On plans to add as many as 100 jobs this year to the 270 it currently employs, opening an office in Chicago this summer, another on the East Coast later in 2014, and moving quickly after that to grow in England, Australia and New Zealand. The company plans to expand its engineering team in Beaverton, too.

“We tend to not look at ourselves as a real startup company anymore, because the scale of everything has increased to such a great extent,” Raghavan said.

Act-On sells “marketing automation software,” a niche the general public never sees but one that’s gaining increasing popularity among sales personnel at midsized companies. Its software helps track sales leads and monitor the performance of individual marketing efforts so sales personnel can target the most fruitful opportunities.

Marketing technology isn’t new, and Act-On competes against many businesses providing similar services – including e-mail marketers ExactTarget (which Salesforce.com bought last year), and Responsys, a company that Raghavan helped start but left long before its $1.5 billion sale to Oracle last year.

Act-On is mining a market for the next generation of technology, Raghavan said, adding features and services better suited for its midmarket clients.

Founded in 2008, Act-On had raised $32 million in prior backing, most recently a $16 million round in 2013. The company hit an inflection point last year, when revenues soared from $9.2 million to roughly $23 million.

“It’s becoming pretty clear what a dollar spent on sales and marketing will do for the company,” Raghavan said.

Act-On stood out both for its technology and for a finely tuned sales operation, according to David Yuan, a TCV partner who joins Act-On’s board as part of the deal.

“Act-On represents a new class of software vendor who knows how to build a very powerful but stable marketing tool,” Yuan said. The large investment represents TCV’s belief, he said, that Act-On can help create a new segment of the marketing technology sector.

Though Tuesday’s investment is the biggest venture round for Oregon tech in years, clean energy and health science companies have won bigger investments during that time. Act-On is among a handful of promising young tech companies that have emerged in the Portland area in recent years, aided by big investments. The list includes Puppet Labs, Janrain, Urban Airship, Elemental Technologies and Jama Software.

Startups are, by definition, risky propositions and a big funding round can represent an opportunity – but it’s no guarantee of success. Nonetheless, the Portland area’s current crop of startups are supplementing an ongoing surge in hiring in Oregon tech led by the established Silicon Forest ecosystem and a host of out-of-state companies moving in to tap a growing base of tech talent.

While several young companies have netted substantial investments, Oregon’s overall level of venture activity hasn’t increased to match the run-up in employment – suggesting this surge may be more durable than the speculative bubble that buoyed dot-com startups.

Oregon’s tech resurgence is evidence, Raghavan said, of his long-held contention that it’s possible to build a large, venture-backed company in Oregon without relying on investors who demand startups move to the Bay Area.

“Oregon is on the travel schedule of most Bay Area VCs that are really trying to make things happen,” he said.